Presentation at the Restoring the West Conference, 2019: "Using fire to build soil carbon and water holding capacity" Dr. Debbie Page-Dumroese is a Research Soil Scientist with the Rocky Mountain Research Station of the U.S.D.A. Forest Service in Moscow, ID. She has been involved in assessing the long-term productivity of forest soils for many years and has worked on sustaining forest growth after harvesting and site preparation. She has worked for the past decade on minimizing the impacts of slash pile burning while finding a better use for unmerchantable logging residues. This led to using biochar to improve forest,range, and abandoned mine soils around the western US. Debbie has a dozen diverse field sites where biochar application is used to restore soil and hydrologic function.